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If you only follow my writing here, you may have noticed I’ve been quiet recently. In fact, I’ve busy at work for the last month. Over on Medium, I spent November writing a—vaguely—daily journal as an exercise to get back into the habit of publishing things. In a month when most people I know feared for their sanity, it helped my mental health enormously, and I’m planning to keep writing there in a similar format. That will involve some changes to how I manage being a writer, including the way I post on this blog, and you’ll know what those are as soon as I’ve figured them out. In the mean time, I’m sharing the entire journal here. Read as a single text, I think it comes out pretty well, and I’m glad I did it.

I. Performance Anxiety

If you know me, you probably also know I’ve struggled to write this year. Tempting as it is to blame 2016 and move on, there have been a lot of factors. I’ve found it hard to publish anything partly because since last summer I’ve had no address of my own; partly because my mental health, like most of my friends’, has been running low; partly because I’ve spent much of this year working through a history of parental abuse, and partly just because other things have sucked up my time. Lately it’s become a cycle: not having put it to use for a while, I seem to have lost my voice.

To an extent, the joke’s on me. I’m a self-saboteur. As anyone who’s hired me knows, I’m a relentless editor, and in my own writing it turns out that’s a stumbling block. In 2015 and early this year — follow the links above — I did some of my best writing, but since then I’ve feared publishing anything less good. Every idea has been a tough second album, and I’ve found myself unable to write beyond first paragraphs, scrolling back up to scourge imperfections. In What It Is, her graphic memoir about making art, U.S. cartoonist Lynda Barry writes:

Is this good? Does this suck? I’m not sure when those two questions became the only two questions I had about my work, or when making pictures and stories turned into something I called work — I just know I’d stopped enjoying it and instead began to dread it.

There, sans the grace of God, go I.

I’m trying to silence those two questions, at least for long enough to get things done. I’ve hit on a couple of strategies, the first of which involves going low-tech. I have a bad habit of trusting gadgetry to make me work, when retina displays and edit screens only make a blank page more terrifying. The allure of backspacing out bad lines has grown so strong that I’ve fought to write more than a hundred words per sitting, so, in an extreme step, I’ve gone back to writing pen-and-paper.

I have a journal now, hardback with finely ruled pages and a ribbon. It’s where I wrote the first version of this, now layered with scribbles and crossings-out. The permanence of a biro guarantees messiness, and feels more forgiving as a result. Certain artists, I’m told, work with charcoal because they’re forced to live with their mistakes. Ink is the same: on an immaculate white screen, I’d never have made it this far.

Then there’s the other thing: my writing muscles need a stretch. As with many vicious cycles, the only way forward is to accept a short-term cost. I’ve failed to put my best ideas to paper recently because I’ve been unable to write much to begin with, and I’m making peace with being in no fit state to produce miracles. For now I’m going to write what I can, regularly and for the sake of it. Most of the things I want to do can wait — at the moment, I want to learn to enjoy the writing process again.

For the next month, I’m going to try and post daily. I’m not focusing on doing my best-ever writing, and I’m not going to fuss about every post being the best it can be. I’ve worried in the past about things being long, neat and relevant enough, but this month I’m not going to try and Have Something To Say or cater to the news cycle; I’m certainly not going to pay attention to how many people read. I’m going to write whatever’s on my mind, and refuse to stress over it. I won’t be striving for journalism — I’ll just be journalling.

Having neglected it, I’m taking an intentional break from my main blog to do this. Posting daily and in this way isn’t something I expect to maintain post-November, so I want it to stand apart as something self-contained — on top of which, like a writer moving from desk to dining chair, I need a fresh workspace. I might not be publicising posts as much as normal, so if you want to keep up with things here, click to follow my posts on Medium next to my author blurb.

That’s all for now — with any luck, I’ll be back soon.

II. Feeling Good

I biroed fifteen hundred words today. The Mail turns out to have printed a piece about bisexual folk that’s done the rounds — my thoughts here — and employs tropes I want to talk about. I would have liked to get that done tonight, but even by journal-a-day standards I think it needs tidying up. That’ll be published tomorrow, so for now I’m just posting a progress report. (My current sleeping hours are late-running: if I’d been awake earlier I might have finished it, but the upside is that I’ll probably be back at work on it into the small hours.)

I’m having mixed emotions about getting so much done. Coming off months of inertia, just hitting publish on yesterday’s post was cathartic. That release put me in better spirits today than I’ve been in for far too long, which probably contributed to filling eight pages in the notebook. I’d like that to become a virtuous cycle, but I fear burnout. I’m also conscious of the fact that making myself not-obsess is hard. Tomorrow’s post is not the kind I expected I’d be writing this month — it’s longer for one thing, more tied to external events for another, and I’m putting it off till tomorrow because it needs more varnish than I thought posts in this journal would. If I were to try and post something like it every day, I think I’d fail quickly, but part of why I’m doing this is to make myself compromise. I expected there’d come a point when I had to choose production or perfection, and perhaps it just came sooner than planned.

Just typing this has been therapeutic — I’m learning to let go of detailed plans and fixed-length paragraphs. (Eight lines is my go-to: it’s about the same as a hundred words on Medium, which helps when writing to a word limit — but of course, I fixate.) I didn’t leave myself enough time to write this in the notebook, so I’ve typed it from scratch, something I haven’t been able to do with anything this length for far too long.

All told, I’m going with glass-half-full. The satisfaction of churning things out feels dangerous, something that could invite complacency, but for now I’m finding the joy of writing outweighs the fear of failure. There are worse ropes to walk, and worse anxieties.

III. Settling In

I’m still at work on the biphobia piece. On the one hand, I could feel bad about not having finished it. What’s nice is that I don’t. Yesterday I worried about it not being the kind of post I planned to write this month, but I’m realising spending longer than a day on it is helping me write these updates, which was the goal. At the same time, it’s just the sort of piece I couldn’t get past paragraph one on before. Thanks to doing this, I have fifteen hundred words of first draft and five hundred tidied-up. (It’s grown a bit since yesterday, becoming less of a response to the Mail and more of its own thing. There should be subsections — seductive things — in the final version and it’s got a first paragraph that doesn’t yet entirely earn its place, but which I like. There’s a darling I may or may not kill.)

The moral, I’ve decided, is to keep at what I’m doing. There’s a sense now of having found the right rhythm to settle in for the long haul, and I’m much less anxious than yesterday about continuing. (As of this post, we’re already a tenth of the way through the month.) There’s something extraordinarily freeing in writing about nothing: this post and yesterday’s feel like letters to myself, with any other reader’s presence quite beside the point. ‘I’m not having the public in to shows again,’ Stewart Lee says at the end of one set. I worry this will cease to be a joke.

While writing the long post, I’ve been thinking about bisexual history — where the explosion of bisexuality in young people stems from, how the b-word has been defined at different moments in the recent past, and how many early activists for gay rights might now identify as bi. That train of thought led me to dig up Carl Wittman’s ‘Gay Manifesto’, written the year of the Stonewall riots and published in 1970. Not all of it has stood up well to five decades of queer dialectic — ‘we are only at the beginning’, a disclaimer admits early on — but on the whole, it’s as vital as anything being printed now. (‘It’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten,’ remarks Wittman, writing in a socialist rag. Part way through a 2013 TED talk, Mads Ananda Lodahl echoes the line.) Toward the start of Wittman’s text, one finds the following.

Homosexuality is the capacity to love someone of the same sex. Bisexuality is good; it is the capacity to love people of either sex. The reason so few of us are bisexual is because society made such a big stink about homosexuality that we got forced into seeing ourselves as either straight or non-straight. Also, many gays got turned off to the ways men are supposed to act with women and vice-versa, which is pretty fucked-up. Gays will begin to turn on to women when 1) it’s something that we do because we want to, and not because we should, and 2) when women’s liberation changes the nature of heterosexual relationships.

We continue to call ourselves homosexual, not bisexual, even if we do make it with the opposite sex also … We’ll be gay until everyone has forgotten that it’s an issue. Then we’ll begin to be complete.

IV. Self Sabotage

It’s twenty-five past ten and I’m getting to work. My rule with this notebook is to post something by midnight. Yesterday I started at ten, Wednesday at nine thirty.

There’s a pattern I tend to fall into. (Other people do it as well, but I’m a chronic case.) If you’d flipped through my school exercise books, most of all maths, you’d have seen a steady decline in neatness from the first week of each term, until the last entry was a crumpled pencilstubbed mess. I’m like that with everything that involves effort, and particularly with timekeeping. A lot of academics say they’re procrastinators, but my habit at university to put things off later every week. The first essay for any given tutor was sent a day, perhaps two, before we met, the second the evening before and the third late at night. By Hilary of fourth year I was sitting down to type with an hour to go.

It turns out this is known as executive dysfunction. I stumbled through Oxford with severe undiagnosed mental illness: the upper second I left with could easily have been a first if I’d known what was wrong. I don’t particularly remember my three years there; what anecdotes I have are lampposts in low-hanging fog. Oxford is notoriously brutal on mental health — in second year, I got used to being woken at 4am by my own hands shaking — and several friends were formally punished for succumbing to stress and self-harming. In my first year, after a bout of depression culminated with me dropping a grade, a disciplinary meeting placed me on probation. (‘Other options’ were hinted at in ominous passing.) To my embarrassment, I still nurse a quiet grudge against that tutor. Then again, I suppose I hid things well. During the year I lived in a block of college-owned flats, the site manager said I’d impressed him: ‘I’ve never had you on suicide watch.’ There was, as I recall, an Excel sheet.

In the years since, I’ve learnt how to deal with being depressed. The new thing is anxiety. Since starting out with this journal, I’m noticing how often I’m anxious — particularly about work, or what passes for it. On Tuesday I was anxious about whether I’d write a first post; on Wednesday, about burning out. Yesterday’s post, about getting into the groove of things, wasn’t anxious, but now I’m worrying about letting the schedule slip. Noticing progressive lateness never helped remedy it in the past. I’d like to believe I’m invested enough by now to stick the month out — I certainly mean to — but I’ve given up second-guessing my own brain. At least I’m noticing the fear now. There’s a cliché about realising you have a problem, and on that front, I already feel somewhat better.

Ten to midnight. Phew.

V. After Class

I’m watching Class, the Doctor Who spin off by Patrick Ness. Like the creatures that roam his books, it’s a strange beast. Originally asked to write for Who, Ness has a gift for making the familiar sinister, and the series’ best asset is its mood. ‘Do you know the feeling of dread?’ one main character asks, referring both the night terrors stalking his sixth form and to adolescence itself. (‘Teen angst’, another asserts, ‘is a pejorative phrase.’)

There’s a lot wrong with Class: from the get go, it’s apparent that Ness, a novelist, hasn’t written television before. The pilot episode attempts to spin ten plates at once, something more feasible in print, while the best yet, a tale of grief and folk music set entirely at night, thrives on being pared down. Not all the main characters work: stretching the drama thin, there are six when there should be four or five. (We simply don’t spend enough time with Charlie, the awkward alien prince, for Greg Austin to portray shades of grey, so the character’s mood swings from caring to barbed feel forced.) For every zinger — these come thick and fast from Katherine Kelly’s anarchist — there’s a joke that doesn’t quite land. And yet.

I like Class mostly because I want to; critics seem to feel the same. Half way through series one, it has yet to make good on its premise, but the glimpses of what it wants to be deserve a second run. Ness is helped out by the wave of good will toward his show: between fans of his books and Whovians starved of a spin-off for five years — indeed, this year, of their main attraction — viewers want to see Class succeed. For now, I do as well.

If anything tempers my willingness to wait and see, it’s the choice to give an entire spin off to a writer with no TV credits. Unlike the cast of Class, almost all Doctor Who’s writers look much like Patrick Ness, who was approached after success in an industry that favours people like him: it’s hard to see the same trust being placed in an equally green woman or writer of colour. None of that diminishes his talent, or the quality of his show, but I wonder about the unmade spin-offs as good as Class or better.

I like it, though.

VI. Getting Out

When you come out, there are meant to be tears and piano chords. You’re meant to do it as a teenager: sit down with mum and dad and break the news, promise it wasn’t a choice, cry a bit. Then they’re meant to tell you they accept you — that it’s just who you are, and they’ve known for a while, and God didn’t make you this way to punish you. If they don’t disown you, they’re being wonderful, and you give them however long they need to deal with it. It’s best not to deviate from the script: you’re expected to be vulnerable. You’re not allowed to be complex.

Before ending contact, I never managed to come out — partly because it was never a secret I was queer, mostly because my mum was an emotionally abusive narcissist. When she did grill me over it, at ten and eleven and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty-one and twenty-two, I wasn’t cooperative; using the word queer was only part of that. I have a sexuality no one has ever been able to guess because most don’t know it exists; I do experience it as a choice and not a natural state; I find the line between heteronormative parenting and psychological abuse blurry, and I think coming out normalises erasure and commonly prioritises straight parents’ comfort over their queer kids’ safety. Also, I’m an atheist. Whoops.

I didn’t come out — I got out. The end of that relationship proved to be a respite from a parent who weaponised every vulnerability. When my mum told me gay people went to heaven, it felt like one more invalidation of my choice to exit her faith. When she told me she was okay with who I was — I hadn’t asked, though it was a step up from ‘what you are’ — it felt like an attempt to get close enough to hurt me. For a long time I felt guilty for keeping the queer side of me at arm’s length from my mum, ashamed of having felt vulnerable, even of having been ashamed. Recently, the most freeing realisation has been that being a demanding and impossible-to-talk-to queer — being queer at all under that roof — allowed me to carve out a space too alien for my abuser to enter.

I didn’t keep that from my mum because it made me vulnerable. It kept her out because it made me powerful.

VII. Copy Writing

I have a prurient habit: when in the mood to write, I retype things I admire. Scroll through my folder of unpublished drafts and you’ll find whole facsimiles of other people’s work, most recently a stretch from Zadie Smith’s new book about dancers and writing style. Further down are Jess Row’s New Republic essay about white novelists; the gay liberation pamphlet I quoted last Thursday; a five-part work of slash fiction by a fan of The Flash, and both the first and final drafts of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’. (Writers are told to read widely. I like to think I do.)

I don’t know when I first did it or why — only that re-ingesting things this way helps me relax. It’s also made me pay more attention. The Internet’s endless distractions encourage skimming, but retyping an existing text requires you to read it closely; like wax on a headstone, it shows every contour. When I do it, I notice which lines jar in my own voice; punctuation marks I’d leave out; how no two writers sound the same and why each sounds the way they do. I think that’s made my own writing stronger. Then, of course, there’s geometry.

I pause here to note I’ve succumbed once again to eight-line paragraphs. (I’d broken free of them this month, but they’re seductive beasts.) Part of the pleasure of duplicating posts from other platforms is playing with the shape of them: seeing how Medium enjambs things differently, how paragraphs get remoulded. I’m frankly obsessed with all that, to a degree I doubt could be called neurotypical, and part of the allure of posting here is knowing where each line will end on being published. WordPress’s awkward edit screen can’t hold a candle to that thrill.

VIII. The Hellmouth

I’ve been nervous since late last night. Folding my laptop shut for bed, its calendar icon jumped out at me — reading, in tiny script, Nov 8.

I’m not from the US, but I have enough contacts there to have picked up the mood. Friends on Facebook have been posting all day, few of them really saying anything. Chatter like this must fill bunkers before bombs fall: having by now done all they can, people have nothing left to do but wait, and anything hurts less than the quiet. For the first time I can recall, the Internet sounds like a bunch of people on their phones. If everyone tweeting furiously were put in one hangar, you could hear a pin drop.

In the sequel to the first Ghostbusters, there’s a river of phlegm beneath under New York; venture too close and it’ll make you a danger to yourself and others. Throughout the film, the slime seeps up through pipes and pavement cracks, steering prams into roads and starting fights; eventually it coats entire buildings, a great reservoir of hate rising from under Manhattan. In the video for the movie’s theme, a certain billionaire strides out of his own tower. ‘Trump’, remarked Obama last month, ‘didn’t build the building himself. He just slapped his name on it and took credit for it. And that’s what’s happened in [his] party. All that bile — all the exaggeration, all the stuff that was not grounded in fact — just bubbled up.’

The Trump campaign is not best understood as politics. As successive debates made clear, politics isn’t what Trump is about. For his most hardened core of supporters — those who retweet their leader’s rants and were positively enthused by boasts about pussy-grabbing — Make America Great Again is about something deeper than goings-on at Washington, namely the urge to exhume every necrotic idea presumed to have been laid to rest last century. Trump is only the electoral face of a movement with many more, most of them equally bleach blonde; a byword for the promise that soon, very soon, no one will mind your confederate flag. You’ll be free to cheer the shootings of unarmed black kids and firebomb mosques, to drive women from public space in person or online, to call a cunt a cunt and a bitch a bitch and to resist the encroachment of faces unlike yours on TV and video games. In great-again America, no one will be prevented from speaking their mind — only from frowning when you do.

That movement won’t retreat after tonight. Even if Hillary Clinton routs Trump, you can’t kill an idea — or, if you can, someone can bring it back. When Trump’s supporters mounted a campaign against the Ghostbustersremake, it happened in the comment section of YouTube — till recently, a place where the net’s basest urges went to die. This year the pit under America sent something back, poison bubbling to the surface once more. In a few hours, we’ll know whether the slime has risen to the top.

IX. Twenty Sixteen

‘We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.’

‘It’s all over and I’m standing pretty
In this dust that was a city.’

It keeps happening the same way. I turn the news on at kickoff hopeful that people did the decent thing. It’s close, but polls are favourable, and the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. First signs are mixed to good, although we’re told not to read into them. Then there’s a shock result — in Nuneaton, Sunderland, Ohio — and things begin to slide. By half past four I’ve chosen sleep over sitting through a drawn out defeat. Checking my phone on waking up quells any uncertainty I’ve clung to. That’s how it was last summer and this summer and last night, and now the US president elect is someone recommended by the klan.

I’m not American. I don’t have skin in this the way friends do. But today people on the train in east London were shaking and glancing about themselves, and I’ve been getting messages from queer friends who don’t want to be alone. It isn’t just about the city on a hill, the long shadow of US elections. It’s that what happened here has happened here. Across the continent, racism and nativism are taking hold: we’re getting used to the polls being wrong, a technocratic centre left collapsing to a conspiracist far right in its industrial strongholds. Anti-establishment, anti-globalist, post-factual — the votes that handed victory to Trump resemble those that delivered Brexit, and which are squeezing social democrats across Europe. If Washington can fall, what hope is there?

The Doomsday Clock has been at three minutes to midnight for the last two years, its most precarious angle since 1988. In January, when the clock is reset, Donald Trump will receive the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, with every branch of US government controlled by a party that yearns to build more bombs. Fiftysomethings I know tell me they haven’t feared nuclear strikes this much since the Cold War was at its peak. Of course, there are more conventional ways to die.

Just as after the Brexit vote, attacks on minorities are going to spike. There will be more queerbashings, more trans women killed, more black kids shot by police and licenced gun owners; more Pulses, more Charlestons, more Santa Barbaras. Muslims and Jews already have reason to be afraid, and — wall or not — things will get worse for immigrants. As results came in overnight, suicide hotlines for queer youth were reportedly swamped. Trump’s incoming VP Mike Pence advocates public funds for the same so called therapy that led to Leelah Alcorn’s death, and I know far too many people who’ve discussed ideation today. I worry for them and myself.

I admit: I’ve thought about giving in. In the six months after David Cameron’s reelection, I went through my worst spell of mental health as an adult. In the US, I sense Cameron was eyed as the kind of conservative the GOP needed more of: progressive and pro-gay, someone at home in a room with Obama and Clinton. As I’ve explained to American friends, the UK hadno Obama: here, under the Cameron governments, the crash of 2008 was answered with a programme of austerity the Tea Party would have approved. Its impact on poor, queer and disabled people (as well as the country at large) has been catastrophic. Thousands have died.

I’m a homeless mentally ill millennial, raised on a council estate by a single mum on benefits. I voted for Jeremy Corbyn twice, and would have voted for Sanders during the primary. The Tory Party is the sum of everything I hate and that has ever hated me: I struggle to name anything I wouldn’t do to injure it. Last summer I found myself wondering how long I’d take to join its ranks. Over the preceding decade, Cameron had won every major democratic contest in the UK: the majority he achieved that May, as unexpected as Trump’s path to the White House, seemed to spell neverending defeat for the left. That’s how they get you, I recall being struck — not by waiting for you to grow up and drift to the right, but by making you desperate just for once to be on the winning team.

I don’t know how many of my friends will still be alive four years from now. I don’t know whether I’m going to be. Hurting myself isn’t something I want to do — hasn’t been for a decade plus — but I don’t know how many more defeats I can survive.

X. Mood Music

Today I don’t know what to write. It’s the first time I’ve felt that way since starting this journal; actually, since much earlier. (When I had writer’s block, I knew what I wanted to say — sentences just weren’t forming. Now I have the opposite problem.) I’d forgive anyone who took time off right now, but that’s not how a regimen of daily writing works.

For the past week, I’ve noticed my posts have been getting less introspective, becomingaboutthings when I began writing about nothing. I’m giving myself permission not to fret over that, and instead to let the output go where it wants. In a similar vein, I’m taking tonight’s lack of impetus as a sign I don’t have that much to say. There are a million half-thoughts about the election swimming round my brain, of course, but either they’re still nebulous or I don’t want to dwell on them. (In a lot of cases, it’s both.) I’m letting myself be okay with that as well.

I’m concerned about bipolar feelings right now. Specifically, I’m worrying about not being more worried. Yesterday morning I was just shellshocked and despondent; today I’ve been more centred, with a sense of work to do. (The Trump presidency, I’m realising, is the crisis I’ve waited for all my adult life.) I’m scared of the restlessness being hypomanic, or, conversely, of the calm festering into long-term lethargy. I was in one of those a month ago, but managed to break out of it by doing this. I have hope that continuing to write — even just mood music — will do me good.

XI. American Songbook

‘There’s a fire in the priory
And it’s ruining this cocktail party’

I’ve had the same song in my head all day. Last night’s sense of unstable calm has given way to skittishness, and I’ve not been able to write the post I wanted to. Right now, thoughts all over the place, I’m too scattered to concentrate, and I’m accepting that — so here’s the song.

I was thirteen when I first heard Rufus Wainwright. YouTube and Spotify didn’t exist back then: if you hadn’t figured out mp3, you had to watch TV. I watched Jools Holland’s programme because my dad did. His taste in music was gayer than he was — gayer, I sense in hindsight, than he felt allowed to let me be — and when one episode featured Wainwright, he outed himself as a fan. ‘Waiting for a Dream’ is a song about the Bush era, written after Iraq and released in November 2004, whose lyrics mention an ogre in the Oval Office and hint at homophobia. ‘It’s about the screwed up world we live in,’ Wainwright remarked, ‘and how everything’s going to be awful in the future.’

A lot happened in 2004. That was the year I first came out at school, and more importantly, when I started buying records. (On seeing Wainwright on Later again, coveringMarlene Dietrich with Burt Bacharach, I begged my sister for Want Two. It remains one of my favourite albums, and in my eyes his best.) I was aware enough of world events back then to get the references, but it only registers now how much of the music I listened to playing Jedi Knight was about the USA’s moral fall. Also in my CD pile was Morrissey’s You Are the Quarry — ‘America,’ its first track snarls, ‘you know where you can shove your hamburger’ — and 2004 was the year American Idiot came out, all colour draining from the US flag in the title song’s video.

I took all that for granted at the time, but having turned eighteen in 2009, I’ve spent my adult life with Obama in the White House. Frankly, I forgot how things were when the world hated the US. Its next head of state will be infinitely worse than Bush, and although it’ll be a good four years for satirists (if no one else), I’m only just wondering where popular music will go. Please, USA, give me something to sing about.

XII. Down Time

Yesterday was the first post to miss the midnight deadline (by more than a few minutes, anyway). I’m not going to obsess over that — at the moment, my focus is making sure every day in November gets a post, not fixating on the exact timing, and part of why I’m doing it at all is to stop stressing over the process. It’s already made me notice how my own output fluctuates in line with what my brain’s doing, and I’m struck that nothing is coming easily this week. For the first time since starting the journal, I’m building up a back log of unfinished posts. The ones I’m publishing probably won’t be ones I revisit or view as the best, but again, part of the point is letting myself post things that aren’t my greatest work ever. This week I’m thankful for still being able to write at all.

In Missouri, Skepticon is going on right now. From the hashtag, I gather Greta Christina gave a talk about self-care after the Trump victory, and I’m reminded of one line from an old post of hers: ‘frivolous pleasures make the big things possible’. I feel like I’m in a week of duvet days, keeping it together with trivial pursuits while trying not to do too much. Right now, small things are all that make anything possible. Friends have been hosting threads about how they’re staying afloat. For me it’s cake, slash fiction and blankets, tea (Earl Grey, hot) and Mallory Ortberg. Fleur Adcock; Nigel Slater; Orwell’s defence of English cooking; Connor Manning. Playing BioShock; playing Arkham City. Superheroes on the CW. Just a Minute. GBBO. Project Runway. Strictly.

There exists a large section of the left — earnest, engaged and invariably male — that dislikes fun: only the struggle, it insists, should be enjoyed. Most of its disciples aren’t struggling, and this week I want them to shut up like never before. In a week when the klan are doing victory laps, I’d like to believe I can have nice things, if only so as not to die; would like to think people can be politically aware without concentrating every waking moment on how all their worst nightmares just came true. It wasn’t just meetings and street marches that made gay liberation possible: it was disco and drag balls and ridiculous outfits. Queer communities learnt long ago that lifting each other’s spirits is part of an effective politics, and downtime is a lifesaver for those us too mad for capitalism. Without comics and games and silly TV shows, I wouldn’t be a firebrand right now. I would be a blithering, sobbing wreck.

XIII. Apocalypse Always

‘On November 8 we lost a world that was made up partly of illusion, partly of work and partly of hope.’

It’s summer 2002. I’ve just turned eleven, and because it’ll be another year before my mum has her own car, we’re being driven somewhere by her best friend, whose niece is in the back with me and whose tape deck is stocked with contemporary Christian music. The niece is younger than I am, and at some point she asks if I know what my job is yet. I haven’t given it much thought. ‘My job,’ she says, ‘is to bring children into the holy spirit.’

Eight out of ten white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, a third more than for Mitt Romney in 2012. In megachurch America, a cryptofascist of dubious faith is still better than a Mormon; you don’t have to be saved, Jerry Falwell Jr. remarked on election night, to be God’s chosen candidate. I grew up with Christians who thought along those lines, praying to a god who used you, hard and without safewords, to further his designs. Everyone had an assigned destiny: family members were called to do mission work, and I knew church wives who saw childrearing as something they were born to do, children who were taught how to pray in tongues for their role in the coming culture wars. It may not make encouraging reading, but there was some comfort in knowing you had a purpose.

A friend of mine died a few weeks ago. If you follow my other blog, you probably heard about it. Niki was thirty-five, and chaperoned patients into and out of abortion clinics. She was an activist for humanism and reproductive justice, an author of nonfiction and erotica, an atheist from a religious family, a black woman who asked her friends never to call the police on her behalf. She was queer—bi and ace, like me—as well as mentally ill and physically disabled, and as a result of all the above, was food-stamps poor. ‘I firmly believe’, she said once, ‘that just being a minority in America is a traumatising experience.’ Niki didn’t survive the Obama presidency, and part of me is glad she didn’t live to see Trump win.

I don’t know how many of my friends will still be alive four years from now, I wrote this week. I don’t know whether I’m going to be. The election result hasn’t helped anybody’s long-term odds. ‘You and your friends will die of old age,’ a staffer reportedly yelled at DNC leaders, ‘and I’m going to die from climate change.’ It doesn’t feel hyperbolic to ask if the Trump win has doomed us all — to environmental degradation, dictatorship, nuclear war. For the first time, I feel armageddon looming the way my parents did decades ago; the acute sense of my life expectancy being shaved.

At twenty-five, I’m already older than I ever planned for. As long as I can remember, things have been on the brink. I was homeless before my first birthday; grew up with a parent who once tried to kill me; attempted suicide during GCSEs; spent university reeling from the impact. I’ve been homeless for the last year, cut off from family, with cycles of depression and anxiety. I’m realising the toll of all of this on my physical health.

Being mentally ill and suicidal at a young age (before eighteen) is strange, because you grow up with this idea that one day you’ll finally snap, turn off, be brave enough to kill yourself, so you don’t really plan for the future. Adulthood — further life — isn’t for you[.] It isn’t part of your life plan. And then before you know it you’re eighteen and you’re an adult but you never thought you’d get this far and sure it’s great that you’re still alive you guess but also you feel so alone and lost in a world you never expected or planned to be a part of. All my life, the world has been ending.

I turned eighteen the year Obama took office. I’ve been on autopilot since, drifting through the world doing nothing except survive, with no sense of a purpose driven life. The world has always been ending for me — perhaps it was always ending for Niki too — and I’ve never known how to do much more than stay alive. Now, as 2016 draws to a close, I’m scared, and I’m desperate, and I’m fine.

If the world is a stage, people my age came in during the interval. Our childhoods were spent between the fall of a wall in Berlin and that of two skyscrapers in New York, when history still seemed to be over, and we grew up informed we had no need of politics. Until this week, those of us forced to acquire them were still being told there was no point: that liberalism had won out, that the nuclear question was settled; that white supremacy was over and the glass ceiling a fantasy; that gay people could even get married. Then the US elected Donald Trump.

From January, the world will answer to a man whose fans spell his name with a swastika, whose fondness for sexual assault is public knowledge all over the world, but who won the White House with no experience of government — beating a woman with decades of it, whose emails damaged her campaign more than confessing to a crime hurt his. As neoliberalism’s wheels come off, migrants in Europe and America are under fire — increasingly literal — from people who voted to build a wall, and in the fallout of Trump’s election, those who say nuclear bombs keep us safe should tell us: how safe do they feel?

If you had any politics before this week — leftist, feminist, anti-racist, queer — you had to argue for their relevance, expected to make your case to a world not quite convinced anyone still needed ideas like those. Now, from the other side of a mostly-red map, that argument is in the ground.

The Trump presidency is my generation’s crisis — our First World War, our depression, our Jim Crow, our nazism, our red scare; our Stonewall, our Vietnam, our AIDS, our 9/11. It’s the crisis I’ve been waiting for all my adult life, failing to concentrate on anything but survival, clinging on for dear life to politics the world seemed to find quaint. My generation wasn’t meant to be political, but now that everyone’s world is ending, it has no choice. Those of us who’ve been fighting all along never had one to begin with.

Today I know what my job is. My life from this week on is about what it’s always been about: keeping my head above water, handing out as many life jackets as I can. Now, that’s what it’s allowed to be about: pushing back against everything that managed to win on Tuesday, the reservoir of fear and fascism that rose up through the cracks this year but ran beneath us all along. I don’t know whether I’ll get out of it alive — either the next decade or whatever version of armageddon follows it — but until then, I can deal with that. My world’s always been ending, after all.

XIV. Trouble Sleeping

Since my mid teens, I’ve had a non-twenty-four body clock. In summary, my sleeping hours don’t line up with the movement of the earth: on a planet that took an extra hour to rotate, I’d go to sleep and wake up at the same time every day, but because my circadian rhythm is longer than it’s meant to be, my natural pattern is to fall asleep an hour later every night and wake later in the morning. That’s a cycle, which means my sleeping hours rotate, normally taking about a fortnight to realign. For a few of those days, I’m keeping the same hours as everybody else; for a different few, I’m a vampire. It comes and goes to an extent: I was like this continuously from GCSEs to the time I left university, and while I’ve slept normally through spring and summer over the last three years, it kicks in especially hard once the days get shorter. (The core of the problem, apparently, is that my brain doesn’t interpret daylight properly, so it doesn’t help when there’s less of it to begin with.)

At its most aggressive, non-24 is debilitating; in some places, you can claim disability if affected badly enough. If you’ve had jet lag, think about what having it all the time would be like. Missing out on hours of sleep you need and going to work exhausted; struggling not to collapse throughout the day; injuring yourself due to not being alert; feeling dizzy; living with a permanently upset stomach from eating at — for you — the wrong times. When your body clock works the way mine does, that’s what straitjacketing yourself into ordinary sleeping hours is like. (Because it’s unsustainable, it also doesn’t help. When I need to be awake in the day, I’ve learned to rotate my sleeping hours faster, so I’m at the right point in my cycle. Of course, that doesn’t work for long.) There’s a considerable subculture of people with non-24, which is known to be underdiagnosed; when people are told about it, they often realise they they know someone who exhibits signs. Lots of writers are sufferers — or rather, I suspect, lots of sufferers are writers — and references pop up now again in different texts. In one popular work of Harry Potter fan fiction, the hero travels back in time an hour every day to negate the effects. I can’t say I’m not envious.

At the moment, I’m sleeping from early morning to early afternoon. I’ve been missing midnight these last few posts because my brain is wrong about what time it is. (It’s currently approaching 1am, and this week that’s late afternoon.) It’s not the end of the world missing a deadline I imposed on myself, but I’d like to get back on track. Either tonight or sometime soon, I’ll be publishing two of these within the small hours — one for the day before, one for the day ahead. After that, I’ll be more on top of things.

XV. House Keeping

You may have noticed I didn’t put up a post last night. Technically this is yesterday’s, and I’ll be doing two tonight to get caught up. I had a brush with anxiety that kept me from writing, but that’s what the other entry is going to be about. For now, some housekeeping.

I’ve created a publication for all this month’s posts, so there’s a self contained journal to house all the entries. When December arrives, I’ll probably publish the whole thing on my other blog as one long post — I’m curious how it’ll read formatted as an omnibus, and stats tell me most of the people who follow me there aren’t seeing this journal. One of the most therapeutic aspects of writing it has been allowing myself to disregard the traffic and post what’s on my mind — part of why I’ve stuck with two-word titles is that they keep the hitcount down — but some of the updates are pieces I’m proud of having written, and I’d like to share them around.

I’m especially pleased with Sunday’s post, about the strange mix of fear and validation I’ve felt since Tuesday. It’s not perfect — there are ideas that didn’t make it in, others that could be more fully explored, some that don’t connect in the way they could, and as with several of these log entries, it might serve as the skeleton of something more expansive in future — but for a few hours’ work, I think it’s some of my best. Writing on Medium has helped a lot: I’ve mentioned liking how things look here, but the fact publishing is so much faster than on WordPress greatly oils the wheels.

I’m strongly considering keeping up daily posts after this month — not in the same wheelhouse as these, but in one form or another. I haven’t worked out the mechanics of that yet — where I’d do it and how I’d balance different commitments. (In particular, I’m concerned about fitting longer and more commercial writing into my schedule.) But I’m aware that, election or no, I’m in far ruder mental health this month than I’ve been for most of the year, and almost all of that is due to doing this. I think that bodes well for productivity in future, and I don’t want to let it die.

XVI. Loose Ends

I have an old jumper I can’t let go. It’s long since been unwearable, and for most of this year has languished at the bottom of a large rucksack. I fish it out now and again to try and persuade myself to bin it, only to end up stuffing it back down. It hasn’t been donatable for years: woven from a loose knit, it’s lost its shape the way wool does, too baggy and too short at the same time; the left elbow is now more hole than sleeve, and enough threads hang loose that if any of them were pulled, the whole garment might unravel. But I can’t throw it out. Even after wearing the thing to death I cling to hopes of saving it, hiring someone perhaps to darn the holes or rework it into a scarf. It’s quite ridiculous, but I can’t say goodbye.

It was early 2014 when I got that jumper — a gift from the January sales just before I left England for Berlin. My mum was never all that good at picking out presents — in retrospect, a sign of how much of myself I kept from her — but some time between Christmas and New Year she saw ordered it after seeing me windowshop. It snowed in Berlin till late March that year: I wore the jumper nearly every day, sharing it with whoever I was sleeping with, a piece of home I couldn’t do without. Even in its sorry state now it means too much to get rid of, the last physical remnant of a lost relationship. In thrift store speak it would be called well loved. I can’t tell if love or denial keeps me attached to it — but of course, that was always my problem.

XVII. Carrying On

I’ve been slacking. I last posted here ten days ago, and I was behind schedule then: to achieve thirty posts in November, I now need to publish fourteen over two days. At the moment that feels achievable — if I don’t manage thirty, I’m confident-ish I can do twenty-five — but a couple of weeks ago I felt certain I wouldn’t miss a day, so feelings might not be much to go on. For now I’m just splurging, because the sooner I finish this post, the more quickly the rest will come. (I’d like to put the last one up by midnight on Wednesday, but I’m not being fussy at this point.)

I’m not sure why I fell off the wagon. There are a few factors I could point to, but none of them feel important. Frankly, I’ve been finding it tough to stick at anything this month. One of the upsides of a brain on permanent apocalypse-standby is that I’m a coper — while a lot of people I know have struggled to keep going since election night, I’m adaptable to an unhealthy extent — but for the last three weeks, focusing has felt like more work. My attention span is shorter than it was a month back: I’m finding I don’t have the energy for reading Facebook posts more than a paragraph in length, or working on the same thing for five minutes without jumping between apps. That’s been making it hard to get things done.

Writing thirty short posts like this over a month shouldn’t be challenging. The fact I’m finding it so difficult shows how much my writing muscles have atrophied this year. You’re reading the pained wheeze of a couch potato during the first pushup. (Write about what you know, they say.) What I’m taking from that is that I’m doing the right thing. Part of me has felt bad about not covering thebig stuff recently, but the truth is that journalling is what I’m currently capable of. The only way out is through — or, to put it another way, I’m only going to get back to full writing strength by doing more of this. I’m all but decided that I’m going to keep at it in December, if only to reach a point where I don’t skip days.

In the mean time, back to it.

XVIII. Crunch Time

On the shelf next to me, there’s a cup of iced coffee with the strength of several espressos. A few months back, when I was keeping more ordinary sleeping hours, I weaned myself off this stuff, but for the next eight hours I expect I’ll be drinking quite a lot of it.

It’s quarter past four in the afternoon, and I’ve been awake since eleven o’clock last night — that’s where my circadian rhythm is right now. I’m determined to get as many posts put up tonight as possible, with ten a target and fifteen an ideal. After that, I’ll sleep for a week.

In actual fact, what tends to happen when I stretch myself like this is that my brain’s rotation back to normal sleeping hours gets thrown off-course. I expect — hope — to go to bed after midnight and wake up midmorningish tomorrow, but whether I do the same thing on Thursday night is anyone’s guess. That isn’t what’s happened in the past.

I have a few half-written posts I can probably finish off tonight, and a few short ones I should be able to write without difficulty; I’ve been at work on one of the bigger ones for a few hours now. Mostly, this one’s my way of kicking myself into gear and actually clicking Publish on something.

XIX. Five Recs

Someone less televisually inclined than me recently asked what shows and films I’d recommend. I had a lot of responses, because of course I did, but eventually got it down to five. Since they were suggestions for one person, who doesn’t spend as much time as I do at the entertainment-critic end of the Internet, I expect many of the people who read me already familiar with most of them — but I liked what I said about them enough to want to share it. Here are the five things I endorsed.

It was about a year ago Jessica Jones came out. Like Marvel’s other Netflix shows, it takes place in the same world as The Avengers but not in the same part of it. At the cinema, Marvel is colourful and funny and family friendly; Netflix is where adapts the darker, more adult stories from its comic lines.

Jessica Jones is written and directed mostly by women, and it shows: it’s about PTSD and alcoholism and misogyny and the aftermath of relationship abuse, and it received a lot of praise for how it deals with those. While Game of Thrones and Outlander have been criticised for gratuitous, pornographic portrayals of rape, Jessica Jones doesn’t depict sexual violence: it depicts the survivors and the ways their lives have been affected in the long run. It’s not a series everyone can watch, though most who do love it — and you won’t look at David Tennant the same way again.

This autumn, one of the characters from Jessica Jones got his own show. Luke Cage is about a black man who’s experimented on in prison and becomes bulletproof as a result. Marvel describes its Netflix as small-scale stories about heroes who ‘save the neighbourhood’ rather than the world, and Luke Cage is set in Harlem with an almost entirely nonwhite cast. Ever since marathoning the series, I’ve wanted to write about it.

So many comic book narratives are about Nietzschean supermen rising above their society — think Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne and other ‘extraordinary individuals’ — but Luke Cage is a story about a community. Its heroes and villains are people everyone in the area knows by name, and the tension derives from who the barbershop owners and musicians and immigrants are going to side with. It’s about what being a legitimate superhero means when you’re someone police are more likely to shoot at than see as the good guy. (At one point, black men in Luke’s neighbourhood take to wearing bullet-holed hoodies as a show of solidarity.) I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Harlem’s literary culture last century, and although part of the point of Luke Cage is that it wasn’t made for me, there’s much present that I adore, including an amazing score. In addition, Alfre Woodard has one extremely memorable scene.

If you’re after an adult take on comic books but not a grown up one, Deadpoolmight be for you. Equally, it might not: it’s the sort of film you either have a taste for or don’t.

In the world of Marvel comics, Deadpool is an unstoppably snarky mercenary who knows he’s in a comic book and makes fun of his own stories. The character is a favourite with a lot of fans, but for a long time was seen as too risky for a big adaptation, and the producers worked for years to make the film happen: Fox only greenlit it when test footage was ‘leaked’ and reactions were enthusiastic. (It went on to become a hit.) The trailer above is probably the best preview: in a nutshell, expect over the top violence, bad taste and eighties pop washed down with quips and extreme silliness. I loved it, with the odd criticism, but not everybody has to.

Stranger Things is by far my favourite new series this year. A lot of people feel the same, to the extent I’d be surprised if anyone still hasn’t heard of it — but if you’re that person, this is for you. Despite all my best efforts to find fault, I found this show to be flawless.

Stranger Things is a sci-fi-horror-fantasy serial, just eight episodes and all the better for it, about a missing child in a small midwestern town during the nineteen eighties. (Winona Ryder plays the mother.) Everything about the series is beautiful, and it plays like a love letter to Steven Spielberg and Stephen King and John Carpenter. Without becoming any less of its own thing, almost every frame is a reference to something: a better advertisement than any of the trailers is the amazing title sequence. While it’s more than worth it, there are bits — particularly toward the start — that I wish I hadn’t watched late at night. To quote one scene:

‘Ninety-nine times out of a hundred a kid goes missing, the kid is with a parent or relative.’

Dreadful is written by John Logan, whose work I often appreciate (he’s probably best known for writing the last two Bond films), and features a cast of Victorian ghouls: Frankenstein, Dracula, Doctor Jekyll, Dorian Gray and the Wolfman all exist and meet each other in this story, but there’s much more going on, and much more depth and intellect than normally survives that sort of monster-mash. Like Flesh, it’s a distinctly queer take on the horror genre, and although Penny Dreadful has a different aesthetic (high gothic rather than kitchen sink drama), the two shows share many of the same themes: mortality, sexuality, gender, religion, insanity, identifying with the monster. It also has an astonishing cast — Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, Billie Piper, Rory Kinnear, Helen McCrory, Simon Russell Beale, Patti LuPone — who all bring their individual A-games.

There are other series I have more complex emotions about: Westworld, rounding off its first season, in which Anthony Hopkins proves he’s still top of his game; Humans, a more domestic exploration of similar themes, based on but better than a Swedish hit; Outlander, which I love except when I don’t (see above); Black Mirror, especially the new run, which by its nature varies week-to-week; and the Doctor Who spinoff Class, which I’ve had a love/hate reaction to, but whose last episode convinced me it can make good on its promises. But the five recs about are the things I like unreservedly — almost, at any rate.

XX. Super Queer

Before superheroes were everywhere — before box office juggernauts and shared universes and crossovers — there was Smallville on the WB. I was ten when it premiered, and watched the first two seasons like clockwork. I don’t remember how it fell off my radar — I have a feeling Channel 4 stopped airing it in the UK, and this was before all TV shows were online — but a few years ago I marathoned the entire run.

Smallville isn’t the greatest show: for most of its ten years on air, nothing really happens, and it suffers from being made when producers were still afraid of going full comic book. (Clark Kent can’t fly. Nobody wears a proper supersuit. Kryptonite starts out being called ‘meteor rock’.) It has its moments though, one of which has been on my mind.

In one of the earlier episodes, Clark, who moves fast enough to stop bullets, meets a boy about his own age who outruns him. Bart is Smallville’s take on the Flash, and the story is about Clark’s response to meeting someone else like him for the first time. Preparing to leave town in the last scene, Bart notes how fast and strong Clark is and invites him to come along; Clark invites him to stay. When Bart says that he has no reason to, Clark tells him ‘You have me’ — and then runs after him. Just as he’s about to catch Bart, the other boy turns back to grin, then speeds away, ten times faster than Clark will ever be. Clark grinds to a halt in the dust, staring in amazement. Then he just smiles.

The scene plays like an over-the-top teen romance because it is — commenters on YouTube observe how obvious it is that Clark’s smitten — but even the writers don’t seem to have noticed. You wouldn’t think anyone could miss it, but Smallville is insistently heterosexual: in its full run of 218 episodes, only two minor characters are explicitly anything but straight, and one of them is killed. This isn’t queerbaiting: it’s a series from 2001 that never caught on to the existence of diverse sexuality enough to exploit it, let alone to depict it realistically. The showrunners aren’t milking this scene to tease their audience: they really are that oblivious.

Fast forward to 2016 and things seem rather different. But are they?

When Smallville ended, the WB had become the CW. Adaptations of DC comic books now air on the network four nights a week, with an ambitious ‘crossover event’ currently in progress. The participating series — Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow — share a team of writers led by Greg Berlanti, and feature an array of queer characters. This month, after Berlanti’s announcement a prominent character would come out, Alex Danvers — adoptive sister of Kara Zor-El on Supergirl — has pursued a relationship with Maggie Sawyer, an out lesbian in the comics. When the character gave a speech about her troubled sexual history, praise for Chyler Leigh’s performance trended on Twitter. It’s not hard to see why.

Supergirl’s problem is with its main character. In its first season, the series launched a series of contrived love interests in Kara’s direction, none of which stuck: a love triangle involving James Olsen and Winn Schott was wisely ditched this year, while a suitor played by Melissa Benoist’s real-life husband failed to make an impact. A new addition to the cast is superpowered Mon-El, a native of Krypton’s sister planet with whom Kara has more convincing chemistry — but he’s not the one fans want her to date.

In Monday’s episode, Supergirl saves the life — not for the first time — of Lena Luthor, intercepting a concrete block tossed at her by a rampaging cyborg. After the credits rolled, this moment trended on Twitter as well, with fans shipping the two under the hashtag #QueerEl.

In other episodes, Kara vaporises flying objects with heat vision; here she lands in its path, arms crossed at the wrist like Wonder Woman and shoulders wide, forcing the cement to shatter. We’a seen Superman do this countless times, and everything about the shot emphasises Kara is just as strong and indestructible as her more famous male cousin. And more often than not, when he saves a woman like this, it’s Lois Lane.

Played by Katie McGrath, this version of Lena Luthor is no more a damsel than Lois is, and pairing her with Supergirl would be symbolic. In the scenes where civilian-Kara interviews her, it becomes clear both women are struggling to emerge from the shadow of the men in their families. Supergirl is a show about female relationships: Kara and Alex, Kara and Cat Grant, the Danvers sisters and their mother and the women of the House of El. Why shouldn’t its hero be in a female relationship? And when so many fans see a spark between Kara and Lena, why don’t the showrunners?

When news broke that a character in the Arrowverse would come out, my money was on Alex Danvers — but I nursed a secret hope it would be someone else. Like Supergirl, The Flash has its share of queer background characters, including the local police captain and his fiancé and Andy Mientus as comics villain Pied Piper. But the background isn’t where I’m looking. I’m looking at Flash himself.

When Grant Gustin was first cast as Barry Allen — a different adaptation of the speedster from Smallville — men on the Internet complained. Gustin, a musical theatre performer, was best known at the time for playing a gay chorister on Glee, and — unlike John Wesley Shipp in 1990 — looked nothing like the traditional musclebound Flash of the source material. Neither did he look like Tom Welling or Stephen Amell, the CW’s two preceding superhero leads, with their square jaws and heavy frames — and when the series aired, it became evident that he wasn’t like them. Smallville’s Clark Kent and Arrow’s version of Oliver Queen had been brooding quarterback-type orphans, but Barry was a nerd who’d been picked on at school; whose defining trauma was the loss of his mom and not his dad; who had feelings about it and talked about them; who giggled and sang karaoke; who cried. The Flash’s version of Barry Allen is someone who, if he existed, would be used to being called a fag. Then there’s the love interests.

Like Kara and seemingly all CW heroes, Barry Allen has had a string of perfunctory straight romances thrust on him. When he first appeared on Arrow, a mutual attraction with Felicity Smoak was hinted at, then dropped; on his own show, recent episodes have acknowledged the writers’ uncertainty about what to do with Iris West, who despite being Barry’s foster sister exists solely as the object of his love. Why Barry and Iris are meant to be is never apparent: newspapers from the future — yes, really — just inform us they get married, and critics commonly observe that the characters scenes together never resonate the way they should. The only romantic interest Barry has chemistry with is Patty Spivot, a detective in the second season — but when Gustin is made to portray him as a player, faking blindness to coax Patty into taking his hand and kissing him, it feels off. In my head, Barry likes women just fine, but not the way straight men are supposed to. As easy as it is to see him and Kara going to bed, it’s just as easy to see them waking up and discussing boys, or to see him dating Pied Piper or Roy Harper or Winn Schott. In my head, Barry Allen is queer.

That’s what I hoped to see, but not what I thought would happen. While queers can now exist on the CW, we still don’t get to be the leads — even when the insistent straightness it forces on them rarely succeeds dramatically, and even when audiences see same-sex storylines emerging naturally from characters. With one possible exception, the Arrowverse’s queer characters — Alex and Maggie Sawyer on Supergirl, Pied Piper and Captain Singh on The Flash, Obsidian on Legends of Tomorrow — play secondary roles at best, having been conceived for the purpose of LGB representation: the only characters allowed same-sex interests are the ones put there to exhibit them, while everyone else’s straightness is cast iron. The finest example is Arrow’s Curtis Holt, whose gayness is almost wholly an informed attribute. The man he’s married to only appears for long enough to remind us that he exists, and we never find out what Curtis’s relationships are like; how he felt as a gay Olympian; how being gay and black might have made vigilantism imperative for him. Curtis is gay only to ensure viewers see gay characters — if we weren’t told, we wouldn’t know.

Better and worse examples both exist elsewhere. In Star Trek Beyond, Sulu is shown with a husband for no reason except to depict a same-sex relationship. Fifty years in, it’s better than nothing, but if producers really wanted to make Star Trek gay, they only had to make good on decades of fan commentary about Kirk and Spock. Conversely, Penguin’s sexuality in Gotham reflects everything he is — a maladjusted, emotionally fracturedperson clasping at adoration wherever it is — and he and Riddler are two of the show’s most prominent characters: the only flaw in their relationship is that it’s not allowed to come to fruition.

With the possible exception of Alex and Maggie, the Arrowverse’s best queers are lovers Sara Lance and Nyssa al-Ghul. Nyssa, a minor character in the comics, is shown here as heir to the League of Assassins, a woman of colour whose feelings for Sara invite her father’s displeasure, while Sara starts as a supporting character in Arrow’s second run, but now leads Legends of Tomorrow’s cast: her stories often take the time to ask what visiting the past must feel like for a bisexual woman. I want more storylines like theirs, and I want the CW to let the characters its shows are named after be queer. I want to see Supergirl and Lena Luthor dating and Barry Allen kissing boys and Barry Allen kissing girls and Oliver Queen avoiding relationships altogether. I want writers to show me queer relationships and not just tell me about them, and I want them to see the stories I can see. I want characters’ sexuality to be about their characterisation, and I want queerness to mean something, not just be a token in the background.

It’s about time — that Smallville episode was twelve years ago, after all.

XXI. Thetis (28.11.16)

On losing my voice I assume
that when you dipped me in the Styx
your hands must have been round my throat.

XXII. Size Matters

I know: that last post was only twenty-two words. On the other hand, the one before it was over seventeen hundred.

There’s something I’snoticed this month that’s been simmering in my subconscious a while: I feel guilty about writing anything under a certain length. Even the post from earlier tonight whose sole purpose was to get me into the right headspace for publishing was above two hundred words. Anything less than that feels shameful on some level, and I’m only able to feel better about it by writing something else longer than usual.

Part of this is the impostor syndrome a lot of writers get: while I rarely doubt my ability, I can’t shake the idea that longer posts are more respectable — more like proper writing. Most of it, though, is to do with how I get paid. For the last eighteen months, people who want to make it possible for me to write have been supporting me on Patreon. I’m enormously greatful for their generosity, and for the existence of Patreon itself. (One of the posts I’m always getting round to writing, one I might even write tonight, is about how Patreon has made my output better.) At the same time, one of the side effects has been that publishing anything very short feels like shortchanging my patrons.

I can think of a few reasons this isn’t logical. For one thing, it averages out: I’ve written several posts this month with four-digit word counts, which surely compensates. For another, writing short posts regularly has made it possible for me to write the longer ones. For another, the short posts I’ve written this month add up to a wordcount far exceeding my output from any previous month this year. For another, Patreon lets patrons limit how many posts they sponsor each month: by the time I’m on post twenty or twenty-five, I likely won’t be getting paid any more anyway.

But still.

XXIII. Six Beginnings

Like most writers, I have a long back catalogue of unfinished pieces. Many start well but don’t go anywhere, or else are going places before I lose momentum, but lots contain bits of writing I think deserve to see the light of day. As an exercise in editing and restructuring, I dug up six opening passages that led nowhere and tried arranging them as a sequence. Judge for yourself how well it went.

Berlin is warming up. It’s May 2015, two weeks after the British election, and I’ve spent the afternoon with another exile. Joe is older than me by a couple of years, shorter by half a foot and gawkier than his profile suggests; at some point, I must have decided not to mind. When the weather turns and we hide in a café, there’s a sense something might happen — but the two of us met online because even here, even now, it never just happens. ‘I’ve never properly told them about me being gay,’ Joe says when his parents come up, and on the last word his voice drops fractionally. You’d barely notice the hesitation — except, of course, I would.

I was about ten the first time you asked. After the watershed, there’d been a programme on about gay men in cinema — not The Celluloid Closet, but something in the same vein — and I’d amused myself while you watched Joe E. Brown falling for Jack Lemmon. After the credits rolled you perched in the doorway and looked at me like someone had died. ‘Are you gay?’

I’m meant to say you had me clocked, that as I burst out laughing and you stared helplessly back, it was a coverup for a deep and inevitable truth. I’m meant to offer this as proof you knew before I did, the way mums do — but that’s not what happened. When I remember being ten, I remember how paranoid you were about perverts; how dangerous it always was to give me ideas, and how exquisite your face looked with fear etched all over it.

Kids like me need Jesus. In Europe and America, surveys suggest those of us born after 1990 are both the least religious and least heterosexual generation since records began. This year I attended a talk by a Christian psychiatrist, who argued the sexual revolution had failed. It was no good, he said, to warn teenagers about homosexuality: among millennials, fluidity was now the norm. ‘That’s how it is with my daughter’s friends,’ a woman behind me groaned on the way out. ‘They’re all bisexual.’

Like most of my peers, I fall for people in all directions — not necessarily at the same time, in the same way or to the same degree, but without losing much sleep over it. Millennial sexuality is a fast and loose phenomenon: in a poll conducted last year, half of 18–24 year olds described themselves as less than totally heterosexual. The generation born after the end of history has bigger problems to contend with than the wrath of God, and between every crisis and the next, all we can do is care for each other.

I grew up in the church. When I was ten months old, a priest prayed that I’d know a life of constant fear, and for a decade and a half my mum and I lived below the poverty line, supported by churches we attended. The abuse I lived with — physical, spiritual, emotional — went a lot further than queer hate, and I’ve spent years getting to grips with it, principally in writing. After I got out at sixteen and found comfort in words like atheist, a clipping appeared on my mum’s pinboard, offering a consolatory list of biblical figures with lost children. Others have travelled the path before you, it said. Manoah lived through the suicide of his son.

I’ve spent most of this year processing a difficult truth. My mum was a narcissistic parent, the kind of caregiver whose children act as an extension of their personality and exist to make them feel good. In our relationship, that played out in a lot of ways, and there are stories I’ll tell in a different post — but one of the main ones was that she was a person you went out of your way never to upset. Every family fights, but our arguments weren’t about expressing needs: they were contests of emotional cruelty I usually lost. If you upset my mum, you paid for it, and if she upset you, you didn’t mention it in case it upset her.

One consequence of this is that when someone is upset with me, I have a hard time dealing with it well. In the past, after putting my foot in one social cowpat or another, I’ve had anxiety attacks and not been able to get out of bed. I’ve had flashbacks that made me relive every moment of poor judgement I can remember. I’ve felt sick and not been able to eat, and I’ve wanted to hurt myself. I’m working on not doing these things any more.

I’m trying to be kinder to myself. I’m trying to bear in mind that literally no one gets through their life without upsetting anyone; that the fact someone is upset with you doesn’t always mean you did something wrong, and that when I’ve done something wrong, fixating on self-punishment is selfish rather than compassionate: it doesn’t repair whatever damage was done, and it centres the situation around me. I’m trying to listen to people instead of dissociating. I’m trying not to apologise more than once. I’m trying to remember that someone I’ve hurt still doesn’t get to treat me however they like, and that I still get to expect fairness. I’m trying to learn how to acknowledge the harm, make whatever amends, then let myself think about something else. I’m trying to get better at living in my own head.

Ahead of me, a blonde woman splutters in industrial speed German. I can’t tell if it’s tobacco or air, but between bursts clouds rise from her nostrils, making her look like a pissed off steam train. The two of us have been here since the actual train failed to appear, and there must now be a hundred others on the platform, suitcases and strained expressions inches apart. Frau Blond has cornered the stationmaster, who soon retreats, and others are letting off steam as well. Along the concourse it wafts out of opened thermoses and lungs, sticking in the night air like thin, low hanging fog. Ten days into September Berlin’s cold snap has arrived, and the mist is hitting the fan.

Schöneweide is an industrial carcass, grubby and still ungentrified — an area, one ill advised marketing campaign, mit viel Potenzial — but it cleans up well when the rust and concrete freeze over. I learnt what Pendelverkehrwas when this was my station, though in four years I’ve never seen so much of it. It was ten o’clock when I left Neukölln, but reaching the airport will end up taking me till one. I’d be fuming, as my fellow would-be passengers are, but my flight doesn’t leave till the morning. I’m en route now partly to sleep inside the terminal, partly to make what Berliners call a Polish retreat, quitting town with a minimum of fuss.

XXIV. Archaic Torso

Since the head is nowhere to be seen,
you can’t meet the unanswerable gaze
of its ripe eyes, but a low burning stare
held back in the torso still flickers.

Without it that fine pectoral arch
wouldn’t blind you, nor the hips’ slow smile
curve its way toward the creative place
in the centre where everything begins.

Then the thing really would be defaced,
slumping its shoulders in plain sight
not glistening like a wild thing’s pelt

or supernovaing out of itself.
That’s its look, and not an inch of it
isn’t watching you. Now see to your life.

XXV. Two More

I’m just beginning to burn out, and by now drinking any more iced coffee would be the death blow my digestive tract craves. At quarter past eleven it seems safe to assume I’ll miss thirty posts, but with this and two more, I think I can reach twenty-five. That seems a satisfactory place to stop, and finally to get some sleep.

I’ve wanted to translate that Rilke poem for years. I first read it aged sixteen, perhaps seventeen, in a Reclam edition I bought at Harrods with only twenty pence pieces. (I’ve been a troll for years.) That are a lot of translations I like, Don Paterson’s especially, but few ever seem to capture the second stanza’s eroticism. For me it’s also about the reflexive gaze, the act of noticing oneself looking and feeling watched. ‘I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me’, Sartre writes of someone staring through a keyhole. ‘Somebody has seen me.’ Rilke’s sonnet is about a decapitated but still-present god, who retains the ability to see and shame us as long as we stare at his headless body. That’s modernity for you.

It’s nearing half eleven now, and I need to press on to make those twenty-five posts. Still the need for arbitrary length hamstrings me—this paragraph, not unlike characters I discussed earlier, is here only because I feel it needs to be.

XXVI. No Comment

One of the perks of Medium is how little time posting takes: after clicking Publish, all I need do is add each post to the publication for all the month’s and choose to ‘hide responses’ in case people leave any.

I got rid of my main blog’s comment section this summer, and now find it hard to understand why anybody still has one. I know bloggers who have very active comment sections, with friendly regulars they’ve known for years, but whenever I see anyone post about their commenters, it’s because of the low standard of discussion. It would make sense if things were naturally biased that way—people don’t tend to post as much about blog comments they enjoyed—but mine were never worth the work. When I look back through the comment section on my old posts, I’m astonished I put the amount of time I did into moderating and participating.

Here’s what I think is at the root of my outlook on this. I like discussing my posts with others—I love hearing from people and getting their thoughts and teasing out new bits of the subject matter—but I don’t consider it part of the work. Check out a book from your local library and you probably won’t find pages in the back for readers to leave their own opinions about the author’s subject, or write whatever passing thoughts are on their mind. That’s how I feel about my writing: the posts themselves need to be self-contained, or something about them is compromised. The place for discussion is social media.

XXVII. And Finally

This is the twenty-fifth and final post for November. Thirty would have been nice, but I’m not going to sweat it — there are ten minutes left to write and publish this, and I’m exhausted, but I’m feeling good.

I don’t know how many words I’ve published this month — there isn’t time to check right now — but it’s either a high four digit number or a low five digit one. That’s many times what I’ve put to paper at any prior point this year, and it’s also done wonders for my mental health. Even though it’s been on the blink this month — to put it mildly, whose hasn’t? — I’m feeling miles more productive and less lethargic than I did in October.

I want to keep this up, ideally with the aim of achieving the full month’s worth of posts in December. Eventually, I’d like to reach a point where I’m journalling every day and writing more serious things at the same time, but I need to get back into the habit of writing before I can do that: this month’s journal has been a kind of writing gymnasium, and again, I feel good. As the name might suggest, the Novembering publication here isn’t going to house any more posts — not till next November, at least — but I’ll probably create a new one for longer-term writing in this vein.

Thank you if you’ve read all the posts, or even some of them. I consciously set out to not to try and write for an audience, and this month’s hitcount has been tiny compared with the other blog’s — I’m still thinking I’m going to post this entire journal there as one piece — but if anything, playing an intimate gig has been refreshing, and some of the posts have still done quite well in relative terms.

I’m going to sign off now. Since I’m planning to keep this up, there’ll be time for a more detailed post mortem on this project in the next few days, once I’ve slept — but twenty-five out of thirty’s not bad, and on the whole, I’m calling the experiment a success.

‘The art of losing’s not too hard to masterThough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.’—Elizabeth Bishop, ‘One Art’

‘It’s not just unqualified will, as Schopenhauer
would have it, that makes us what we are; nor
is it the will to power, […] but something deeper,
of which the will to power is merely a manifestation.
We want power because we want to matter.’—Rebecca Goldstein, ‘The Mattering Map’

Most of a year ago, half a dozen of us decided to set up this site. When the time came to discuss who we wanted here, Niki Massey’s name came up immediately. I didn’t know Niki that well, but we’d tweeted, and I was one of the people who spoke to her about blogging with us. If I had any doubts about the need for a network like ours, that conversation changed my mind. Like many of the godless people you don’t hear about, Niki, who had multiple disabilities and was cut off from family, lived without much social support. As she put it: ‘I’m poor, I’m black, I’m an atheist. I exist.’

In her spare time, Niki escorted patients outside abortion clinics, where the religious right did their best to obstruct access. Last November, a man in Colorado killed three people at a Planned Parenthood branch: a day later, Niki went back to work. In a talk at Skepticon the same month, she’d spoken about volunteering and how others could get into it. ‘People say thank you,’ she said at the end. ‘They say “You’re super brave for doing this.” But to me it doesn’t feel that way. It just feels like something a decent person does.’

Niki died yesterday. None of us know quite how or why—several conditions she had could have been life-threatening, and her circumstances left her at risk in other ways. What I know is that the friend I last spoke to on Thursday is silent now, and that someone here yesterday is gone today.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote that the art of losing wasn’t hard. Before last night, I never quite got her last line, ‘Write it’ intruding suddenly on the sentence. Today I’m trying to write, and the violent grammar of death is all too real. In her life and her work, Niki fought cruelty in all its guises: without her every fight feels harder, and the art of losing is much too hard.

Next time someone calls atheists small minded Philistines, tell them who Niki Massey was. Niki didn’t expect an afterlife, nor do I think we’ll meet again—to my relief, I realise I don’t wish I did—but I suppose she’d like the thought of resting in power. After the deaths of Jamar Clark and Tamir Rice, she posted about black lives mattering. It’s safe to say part of what cut hers short was that Niki was many things deemed insignificant—not only black, but fat, disabled, queer and proudly, unabashedly unchurched.

If the will to matter is at the centre of what humans do, Niki devoted her own life to making other people’s mean something. She’ll be remembered for that fight, and for the work—write it—she leaves the rest of us.

If you’ve spent time on the Patheos atheist channel, or hang with the same people I do, you might have read Temple of the Future, James Croft’s blog about humanism and ethics. I’ve known James for about as long as I’ve been in the blogosphere myself—we’ve spoken together and write about many of the same things, often disagreeing fiercely—and last autumn he hired me to give his blog a new look. I’ve been worn out over the last ten months, stretched thin between a day job and half a dozen other projects and creatively tired—all credit goes to James for showing me far more patience than I deserved—but this week I at last signed off on it.Continue reading “James Croft Asked Me To Give His Patheos Blog A New Look, And I Said Yes”→

You may have seen a recent post at Brute Reason where Miri announced she was dropping her comment section. Here’s something you don’t know: when we were building the Orbit early this year, I talked about wanting to do the same. Since launch I’ve been going back and forth on it—a couple of months away from the blog made it hard to know what I’d be missing—but now the gears are turning again, I’m doing it. My reasons are completely different from Miri’s.

If you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know my comments were never especially busy. Only the occasional post received more than a few, and those posts were the controversial ones. This isn’t to do with pageviews: even pieces that got many thousands of hits never got comments in corresponding numbers. Small posts got individual messages that rarely demanded replies. Big posts sparked arguments that weren’t to do with me. Both meant keeping up with new notifications.

I know a lot of people with active comment sections. Most started blogging before social media arrived, and have maintained the regulars who found them when comment sections were where you reacted to things. I started this blog in 2013. Since then, other platforms—Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Reddit—have been where people react to my posts. I’m ditching comments for the same reason as more and more big media sites: I don’t believe comment sections are the future.

My author section below gives my email and social media links for a reason. Like most commentators, I like interacting with interested people. I don’t consider it the function of my blog. For many writers I’m lucky to know, blogging works as a dialogue, with readers’ comments part of the process. Especially as someone who experienced abuse, part of what makes writing therapeutic for me is that my blog isn’t a dialogue—it’s a space devoted to my own voice. Round here, I’m talking.

If you’ve been a commenter here, chances are I wasn’t paying much attention. Having designed posts to stand on their own, the comments never felt as relevant as tweets and emails do. You probably deserve better than that. Over the last week, I’ve received a lot of messages in those places, and they’re where I’m likeliest to respond. I’ll also say what Miri said: if you’re one of my patrons, or you’d like to be, let’s get to know each other more. Unlike my blog, Patreon has comments, and I’ll read them.

That’s all there is to this. I’m not closing comments because of any I’ve received, or because I’m stressed out (not that those aren’t perfectly good reasons). The comment section just isn’t why I’m here. I don’t write because I want to defend my opinions. I don’t write because I want to mediate other people’s arguments. I don’t write because I want to manage comments. I write because I want to write. I’m going to focus on that.

When the council finally housed my mum, she got a place where every room had woodchip wallpaper. I was too young when we moved in to remember it now, but I’m not convinced the building was fit for residence. Scraping together the money and tools to redecorate took her years, but when I was seven Andy from church steamed the stuff off, only to find an inch of yellow mildew underneath, coating the walls like custard coloured phlegm. The two of them spent a weekend ridding the bathroom, living room and downstairs loo of it. Elsewhere, the woodchip stayed.

Mum did the house up anyway, painting over it when necessary. For an amateur armed only with half-empty paint tins from fellow churchgoers’ attics, she worked wonders. The living room became sunshine yellow, with crystals that covered it in rainbows on bright mornings. The toilet was tattooed with trompe l’œil ivy, and upstairs she sponged white paint onto blue to make our bathroom wall look like the sky. My sister’s room was styled after the Arabian Nights, wine coloured walls and wicker rocking chair, glow-in-the-dark stars on a dark ceiling. Then there was my room.

For one reason or another, no one ever photographed my bedroom. Woodchip or not, I wish I could convey how brilliant it was. Knowing full well that Aslan was Jesus, I’d powered through the Narnia series, and Mum covered the walls with scenery from their fictional world, painstakingly recreating the Pauline Baynes illustrations. Next to my bed were a broken stone table and Cair Paravel, and behind the headboard white cliffs sloped into a sea that circled the room, a tiny Dawntreader in the distance. Strangely, of all of it, my most vivid memory is of the texture of a shelf.

There wasn’t much space in that room—clothes went in drawers under the bed, board games into spare crevices in the bookcase, toys into a giant wicker toy chest of my sister’s. Once the walls were painted, Andy from church added a wall shelf a couple of feet above the bed, which Mum and I varnished with only enough oil for one side. Underneath, the wood stayed sandpapery: I still remember its roughness, running my fingers across it at night, and how it grazed my scalp when Mum lifted me off the bed throat first. I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to kill you.Continue reading “Mum”→

As I write this, the Seventh Annual Orange Country Freethought Alliance Conference—so good they named it lots—is underway. I know this because over the last hour, friends have been sharing an image showcasing (if not advertising) the conference’s lineup of speakers. According to the ad, there are twelve people speaking at this year’s OCFAC. In stark contrast with the county itself, all of them appear to be white, while in contrast with planet Earth, eleven appear to be men. I’m not here to crucify OCFAC’s organisers—there is, however, a point I’d like to make.

I’ve written quite a lot about growing up in the church. Unlike California, my town was far from racially diverse, but church taught me a lot about gender and visibility. Since the eighteen hundreds, my town—Keswick—has hosted an evangelical convention, now one of the world’s most prominent and influential, which served as Billy Graham’s road to Damascus and gave birth to the idea of let-go-and-let-God. In 2010, twelve thousand people—two and a half times the local population—attended the Keswick Convention, and its grip is as strong today as when I was a child.

Why do I bring this up? In the churches I belonged to, women did everything. I’ve forgotten most of their names, but remember Margaret who served tea and coffee, Hillary who ran Sunday school and Lynn who ran the crèche, Doreen who sent shoeboxes to orphanages abroad, Gill the receptionist, Donna the keyboard player, Lizzie who made soup for the church café, Lynda who sold visitors sandwiches from the church bus. Sara, who was my headteacher. My sister, a missionary. My mum, who sold conventioners traybakes to make ends meet.

In those churches, women did everything—except speak publicly.

This year, the Keswick Convention has thirty-one speakers, of whom four are women. In parts of the local Christian landscape, even their inclusion provokes outrage, and one church my mum belonged to was part of a worldwide network with a firm line against women preaching. Churches today are divided on female leadership—books on family members’ shelves call it an act of Satanic violence—but even those which now employ female clergy obeyed Saint Paul for centuries, with women omnipresent but unacknowledged, voices unheard and work ignored.

When I look at this ad, I see the church where my mum never got the chance to preach.

I got out of the church, and while the women in my family stayed, millions of others have got out too. They’re getting out, and they’ll continue to—in greater and greater numbers if current trends continue. I know dozens of women who’ve escaped the church, and work with some; others are writing books about the ‘exodus’ of women from churches in the US. Still others will just be finding their feet, looking for a place to land after letting to go of God—looking for friends, for books about people like them, for new communities and secular conferences to attend.

My town’s evangelical convention has thirty-one speakers, four of whom appear to be women. That’s just under thirteen percent. The Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference has twelve speakers, just one of whom is a woman. That’s eight percent. It’s one thing to spout buzzwords like diversity, but here’s the question I’m burning to ask. When women from churches like my hometown’s break free of faith and, in search of community, glance toward us, what do they see? Are we better than those churches, or just more of the same, even—whisper it—worse?

If secular conferences have fewer women speakers than churches with thousand-year histories of banning women from public speaking, what are we telling female escapees of those churches about the opportunities for participation our community offers them? This isn’t about the sheen of diversity. It’s about what kind of movement we are. Do we want women fleeing churches like mine to know we have their backs—or that, like those churches, we want them there, working silently and behind the scenes, but never acknowledged or listened to, paid or let on the stage?

There are other reasons to invite female speakers, and plenty of women are qualified. There are reasons to care about visibility in its other forms, particularly, in OCFAC’s case, race. Those have been enummerated in other posts by authors better qualified than me, and I expect they’ll continue to be. This post isn’t an exhaustive treatise on why atheists should invite women to speak at cons—but if you’re wondering why you need to, here’s one answer from me: because when I look at this ad, I see the church where my mum never got the chance to preach.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably noticed this blog has moved. Until Monday, when this site went live, it was hosted at Freethought Blogs, as were about half the other blogs here. I’ve said my goodbyes to FTB, where I was fortunate enough to spend three years. Now it’s my turn, and my pleasure, to welcome you to the Orbit. If you haven’t already, see our public press release; then read our About page, then watch our video on Kickstarter, where we reached our first goal in just over a day. If you’re still hungry, follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

A lot’s been happening these past few days, and we’re still scrambling to catch up. In particular, there have been questions about why some of us left Freethought Blogs to create this site, what our relationship will be and what the differences between us are. Colleagues of mine, Heina and Stephanie among them, have already gone some way to fleshing out the details, and it’s worth noting that ex-FTBers constitute only one part of our membership—but since it’s true that we were the ones who decided to launch our own site, I want to give my own answers to those questions.

To begin with, the Orbit is an independent site. Those of us who’ve moved here from FTB are proud of our work there and want to continue it here, but the association is informal: we’re less a sister site and more of a mutant offspring. As for why we decided to start our own site, the short version is that a few months back, when conversations about updating FTB’s internal structure took place, several of us came to the realisation simultaneously that our ideal network would be easier to build from scratch than to mould by reforming a site with its own history and machinery.

The more we talked about the site we wanted to be, the clearer it was that our best moments were when we didn’t copy FTB, and that it wasn’t the site most writers at Freethought Blogs had signed up to. We didn’t want colleagues to have to choose between leaving a reshaped FTB and staying on a site no longer resembling the one they’d joined, so we made our own plans. If Friendly Atheist readers were wondering, the reason Pharyngula isn’t hosted here is that a network cofounded by PZ Myers already exists: our network isn’t that network, and it works differently.